This British Heatwave Has Got Nothing Whatsoever to do with ‘Global Warming’

Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Britain is currently in the midst of a heatwave with temperatures as high as 34 degrees C (that’s 94 degrees in old money – fahrenheit).

Some of us are old enough to remember an era – the long hot summer of ’76 for example – when this would have been considered a good thing.

“Phew what a scorcher!” it would say in tabloid headlines and inside there’d be a jaunty picture of Mindy from Beckenham greeting the sunshine with her enormous jugs.

But then, everything was better in the 1970s.

Now, of course, it’s all misery and despair. And there’s perhaps no finer example of this than the piece-of-crap report released by the Committee for Climate Change while I was away sunning myself in Sicily, and assiduously reported by useful idiots like the BBC’s house green activist Roger Harrabin. Naturally, the head of the CCC Lord Krebs was invited on to the BBC’s Today programme where he was given a free pass to promote his environmental version of Project Fear.

Here’s a typical example from the Telegraph:

Heatwaves fierce enough to kill thousands will become the norm in the UK within 30 years due to climate change, a report prepared for the Government warns.

Repeats of the extreme heat seen in 2003 that killed more than 2,000 people are likely to become routine by the 2040s, leaving the ageing population at particular risk.

The Committee on Climate Change, an independent body that advises the Government, said people living in newer homes faced a greater risk of overheating than those in older properties.

I wish this were true. I like heatwaves because they ward off ice ages; also I’m more than happy that people in new homes should suffer because they smack of health and safety and EU-driven environmental regulation and I think we should all live in draughty old buildings made of stone like I do.

But it’s just not true. Essentially it’s a work of fantasy, 2000 pages of unutterable drivel overseen by a government placeman – Lord Krebs (a zoologist, specialising in ornithology, formerly of the Food Standards Agency) – who we’re supposed to take on trust as an “expert” but who quite obviously knows far less about climate change than your humble Oxford English Literature graduate.

Paul Homewood shreds his report in loving detail here.

With regards to the heatwave part of the report (it’s just as wrong on stuff like floods, pests and diseases), Homewood notes that there is “no evidence that summers have been getting hotter in recent decades.”

Here’s a chart to prove it.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Wind Industry Big Lies no. 1: Fossil Fuels Are More ‘Subsidised’ Than Renewables

Dishonest or Stupid?

Barry “Dork Brain” Gardiner

Is Labour MP Barry Gardiner vilely dishonest or just incredibly stupid? Personally since he appears to be a litigious sort of fellow I’m plumping for the latter. That’s why, I think it’s quite possible that when he was at his public school Haileybury his nickname was “Dork Brain.” (Though I have no more evidence for this than Gardiner does for most of his hysterical views on climate change)

But I leave you to draw your own conclusions after his recent claim, in an interview with Energy Live news, that the Coalition is favouring fossil fuel energy over wind energy through generous subsidies. (H/T Bishop Hill)

Here’s what Gardiner said:

He claimed the third [lie behind government energy policy] is that Government is “neutral” and doesn’t pick favourites in energy: “Last year the OECD announced that in 2010 the UK subsidised fossil fuels by £3.6 billion. In last year’s budget, the Chancellor announced a further £65million to oil and gas in 2011… In contrast the total subsidy paid to onshore wind in 2010 was just £400million.”

As Bishop Hill notes, he made the same claim in August in the New Statesman:

Last year, the OECD estimated that in 2010 the subsidies for coal, gas and petrol in the UK amounted to £3.6bn on top of which the Chancellor, in the 2012 budget, has announced further exploration and production subsidies of £65m to develop the West of Shetland fields.

So it must be true, right? Not only is Gardiner an elected member of parliament but he’s Ed Miliband’s Special Envoy For Climate Change and the Environment, and also Vice President of (the environmental movement’s sinister taxpayer-funded answer to SPECTRE) Globe International. A man with such important and influential public positions wouldn’t be in the business of telling whopping great porkies, now, would he?

Well, whether Gardiner is lying or thick as pig poo he is most certainly mistaken. Let’s examine his claim more closely in order to spare him and those like him the embarrassment of disseminating false information again.

The claim seems to have begun life in this OECD report, characteristically misrepresented by the Guardian’s Ubergruppenklimatischewahnsinnigefuhrer Damian Carrington in a piece titled Wind power still gets lower public subsidies than fossil fuel tax breaks. It claimed:

Gas, oil and coal prices were subsidised by £3.63bn in 2010, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development , whereas offshore and onshore wind received £0.7bn in the year from April 2010.

This was at best a tendentious stretching of the truth unworthy of a serious newspaper. (If you believe the Guardian deserves such a title). At worst, it’s pure political activism. In fact, as Bishop Hill notes, the “subsidies” claimed by Carrington and Gardiner weren’t subsidies at all.

The OECD paper does not mention subsidies of £3.6bn. That figure refers to the value of the reduced rate of VAT on energy. This does not meet the definition of a subsidy, which involves a cash payment. And since it applies to all kinds of energy it cannot be a “fossil fuel” subsidy either, so Gardiner’s claim about picking favourites is patently false.

His claim about the further £65m for oil and gas is not a subsidy either, being a reduction in a supertax (the Supplementary Charge) which is paid by oil companies but not by renewables firms. This therefore is not a subsidy and demonstrates that government policy favours renewables over fossil fuels the opposite of what Gardiner has said.

This was also pointed out in June by Telegraph blogs’ own Tim Worstall. In reality, he noted, if you go by Carrington’s definition of a subsidy, it’s the wind industry which is subsidised, not the fossil fuel industry, to the tune of £41 billion.

And, if you want chapter and verse on this issue, go to the excellent Communities Against Turbines Scotland site (where the Resistance is articulate and strong) and look up Stuart Young’s report. Government subsidy for Renewables in 2012, it notes, is £1,780 million pounds. Subsidies paid to the gas, oil and coal industry in the same period: 0 pounds.

To recap then: the UK fossil fuel industry is not “subsidised” in any meaningful sense of the word “subsidy.” Charging less tax on something is not “subsidising” something.

The government does not give fossil fuel companies sweeteners to encourage them to produce more fossil fuel power. That’s because they don’t need any incentives: the fossil fuel power industry is perfectly viable without subsidy.

The government does, however, give massive sweeteners to the renewable industry wind especially. Onshore turbines are given a 100 per cent subsidy from the government (aka the taxpayer). Offshore turbines are given a 200 per cent subsidy. Without these sweeteners not a single wind turbine would be built because the power they produce being intermittent and unreliable is to all intents and purposes worthless in a free market.

Therefore what Carrington claims in that Guardian article is untrue. What Gardiner told Energy Live and the New Statesman is untrue. They really ought to know better and now they do. So if they repeat these claims again it won’t merely be down to an error of extreme stupidity, will it? It will be an abject and cynical lie.

Now we’ve settled that one I wish Gardiner the best of luck in his threatened libel action with the daily-more-magnificent-and-admirable Ben Pile (of Climate Resistance) over some Tweets summarised here by the Bishop:

@BarryGardiner is a liar about the OECD analysis, even if he is right about energy proces rising. […] Shame on you, Barry.

A tweet that ended up with quite an interesting exchange of views:

GARDINER: Your tweet is actionable. Please withdraw it. I correctly state OECD figures for Fossil Fuel Subsidies were £3.6bn in 2010

PILE: you can’t call people liars and complain about being called a liar. Oecd figures are for reduced rate of vat, not subsidiesand you know that oecd figures are reduced rate, not subsidies, hence you are dishonest.

GARDINER: Also I said gov policy was based on a lie. No named person = not actionable You named me = actionable Please retract

PILE: it’s true. You knew that what you said wasn’t true. So you lied. I said so. That ain’t ‘actionable’. If you think it isi’ll withdraw my tweet if you explain that you were wrong about subsidies to energy live newsWhen did it become ‘actionable’ to call an MP a liar, anyway?

GARDINER: So reducing tax to favour the consumption of a particular product does not count as a subsidy in your book? Really?

PILE: no, reducing tax is taking less money, subsidy is giving money. I’m surprised an MP can’t tell the difference. Hmm.and reduced rate doesn’t favour any particular form of energy. Applies to renewables too. Surprised you don’t know this.

Send me your email address, and i’ll give you my postal address so you can get your lawyer to proceed

GARDINER: Gardinerb@parliament.uk

PILE: let me up the stakes by adding ‘coward’ to liar.

PILE: thanks. I’ve got no money or property, I hope you realise. Could cost you.

Yep. Popcorn time.

One thought on “Wind Industry Big Lies no 1: fossil fuels are more ‘subsidised’ than renewables”

Tallbloke says:20th December 2012 at 10:27 pmIs Delingpole vilely dishonest or just incredibly stupid? In actual fact the the subsidies for fossil fuels dwarf those for renewables.http://www.nrdc.org/energy/files/fossilfuel4.pdf

Comments are closed.

Why Isn’t Lord Lawson Dead Yet?

The Motive Fallacy

Lord Lawson: not dead, despite the fond wishes of internet trolls

This isn’t me asking, you understand. I’m merely repeating a question someone posted on the internet after Lord Lawson had the temerity to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme speaking out in defence of shale gas in a debate with Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper. (H/T Bishop Hill)

Did anyone on Lawson’s side of the debate post similar messages earnestly hoping that Juniper choked on his organic tofu? Or demanding that Friends Of The Earth have its charity status withdrawn because it’s quite clearly a viciously misanthropic, anti-capitalist political organisation funded by deep-green ecoloons who given half the chance would have us all living in Maoist peasant collectives while they busily bombed our economy back to the dark ages? I doubt it somehow. Climate realists tend to be far too busy being nice and reasonable and balanced – as Lord Lawson always takes pains to do – to adopt the Alinsky-ite smear tactics adopted by their opponents.

I’m sure Lord Lawson can take consolation from the words of his old boss Margaret Thatcher: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

Never were these words truer than in the case of the climate change debate. The alarmists simply haven’t got a leg to stand on, so the best they can do to shore up the ruins of their collapsing cause is to engage in ad homs, appeals to authority and utterly dishonest campaigns like the current Guardian-encouraged witch-hunt to try to force the Global Warming Policy Foundation to reveal its sources of funding.

Why is the campaign so utterly dishonest? First, it succumbs to what Jamie Whyte calls the Motive Fallacy: the demonstrably false notion that if you have an interest (financial or otherwise) in holding an opinion it must perforce be untrue. Whyte gives one example: “A man may stand to gain a great deal of peace and quiet from telling his wife that he loves her. But he may really love her nonetheless.”

But even better answer comes from this brilliant analysis by Ben Pile at Spiked Online!, who notes the outrageous hypocrisy of the greenies’ harassing of the GWPF when its funding – relative to the amount spent on green propaganda – is so minuscule.

Even the £500,000 that the GWPF received from donors in its first year of operations fades into insignificance when put in perspective.

For example, it would take the combined resources of 25 GWPFs to produce an equivalent of the UK government’s extraordinarily patronising Act on CO2 campaign. The Committee on Climate Change spends more than eight times that much each year on its own operations. In 2010, the quasi-independent Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust received government grants worth £156million and £70million respectively. That’s a total of 452 times as much public money as the GWPF took from donors. The billionaire Jeremy Grantham – who has around $1.5 billion worth of stock in oil companies – is the benefactor of the influential Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change, headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, who wrote The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and WWF enjoy gifts of millions of pounds from the UK and EU governments. And the EU funds associations of renewable energy companies to lobby politicians to the tune of millions of euros per year.

It would be an astronomical understatement to say that the environmental activists banging on about the GWPF lack a sense of proportion and have incredible double standards. The GWPF’s resources are far less than even a thousandth of what is available to the government for research and PR – through its departments, the quangos and NGOs that are recruited into its green agenda, and firms and other associations that will profit by it. And yet this tiny operation has seemingly achieved such reach, to punch far above its weight, against the collective force of all the above.

But perhaps the best reason of all why the GWPF should never have to name its donors is this one, as advanced by Bishop Hill on Twitter:

Greenpeace spokesman: ” We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.”. Why would GWPF donors want their names public?

Why indeed.

One thought on “Why isn’t Lord Lawson dead yet?”

Anonymous says:6th February 2012 at 3:39 amLike WWF, FoE is part-funded by the European Commission – which explains a lot